No. All the examples you listed at best make things cheaper, not better, and in some cases they can only do so by sacrificing quality (airlines, walmart) or by destroying profitability in one sector and funding the business somewhere else (carmakers only make money via financing, ride shares only survive due to Softbank, Amazon's "your margin is my opportunity" and AWS, etc)
> It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Certainly not. It would take several of these smaller companies, working in different parts of the research chain and all collaborating organically (without any central planner). The real question is whether it would be faster or slower to develop it in such a scenario, and also if the trade-off is acceptable.
A ride share network being bigger means reducing your time until you get picked up. Imagine 1 car servicing 1 rider vs 10k cars to service 10k riders, they will be much more distributed.
You could also have a complete p2p system and forego a central company. Or your network of 10k drivers could be made of 100 taxi coops, each with an average of 100 members.
> It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Certainly not. It would take several of these smaller companies, working in different parts of the research chain and all collaborating organically (without any central planner). The real question is whether it would be faster or slower to develop it in such a scenario, and also if the trade-off is acceptable.